Er… am I being whooshed? What’s wrong with “the pond froze over”? Sounds perfectly valid to me. You could say “the pond has frozen over” if it froze and is still frozen, but both are equally fine.
Or should it be “durn pond done froze hisself”? 
Or you could use ellipsis like ElvisL1ves mentioned.
“fixing to go and get ready to do something” = “fixing ready to do something”
French too. It’s pretty colloquial but you can say, “Non, je ne suis pas ici le 8.”
I see nothing wrong with that (the crowd points and laughs as Kalhoun frantically dons her dunce cap and heads for the corner).
I think it’s a form of shorthand. Kind of like those…those…people…from somewhere in the East who say “The grass needs mowed.”
I will never get it. Never.
In English, tenses of verbs are most often formed by the use of auxilliary verbs. One way to form the future tense in English is to use the auxilliary verb “will”, as in “I will be there.” Another way to form the future tense is to use the auxilliary verb “to be going”, as in “I am going to be there.” Yes, “I am going” is present tense, but so is “I will”. (There are a few odd things about the verb “will”, including the fact that there is no infinitive form “to will”, but with that verb “will” is present tense and “would” is past tense.) But in combination with an infinitive form of another verb, these two present tense forms give rise to future tense forms “will be” and “am going to be”.
I think this is a state-wide problem. They do it here in the Capital District and as far north as the Massena/Potsdam area.
Just be glad that Ames is no more. “Ames’s” made me cringe every time I heard it. I will admit to saying Penney’s, as in J.C. Penney, since he was a real guy and all. But it’s not like I’m going to his house for tea, so I really shouldn’t say it. It’s the only store I use a possessive for.
Yes. Strictly speaking, there is no future tense in English, just a future mood. Same in German. For a real future tense (i.e. a separate verb form for future events), you need to look to Romance languages (je fis, je fais, je ferai), and even there most of them have a paraphrastic future as well (je vais faire).
In my own defense, if I may, this is odd to me, and I was born and raised in PA. Still live (t)here, too. But I live in southeastern PA, where this is not such a common grammatical construct. It’s much more popular in the Coal Regions and more western areas (i.e., not the greater Philadelphia metro area). Whenever I hear it, it drives me completely batshit insane.
If “froze” bugs your wife, what does she think of “crick” instead of “creek?” My husband, from all over but mostly from Pittsburgh, hates “crick.” Drives him bonkers. Of course, I don’t think he can help himself - after all, he doesn’t realize there is supposed to be a “shk” sound in “pierogie,” so I guess he doesn’t know better.
Re: “Pierogi” – only if you pronounce it the Russian/Ukrainian way, in which it’s spelled Piroshki. Piroshki are also baked rather than boiled, so they’re really two different things. Pierogi (no final ‘e’) is Polish and pronounced “pyeh-ROH-ghee.”
You’re right, of course. Over the years I have gotten lazy with the spelling, I guess. My grandmother is Ukranian/Lithuanian. She actually makes both things (and I consider myself more than blessed), but my husband the Mexican (like most people around here) can’t tell the difference. He also refers to something called “kill-bass-ee” from time to time, but I think he does that out of spite, just to annoy me.
You’re right; I should have remembered that “will” technically isn’t the future tense either.
Whoa, matt_mcl! Waitaminnit!! What do you mean that English has no future tense, but rather a mood? Does a “real future tense” verb not have auxiliaries such as in “I will go”?
And, Giles, is “will” as in “I will go” really a verb? And how could “would” be its past? One’s future, one’s conditional…
Here are all the forms I can think of offhand of “to go” (first person only), along with traditional names I remember from somewhere:
I go. (present)
I am going. (present progressive)
I do go. (emphatic?)
I went. (past)
I was going. (past progressive)
I had gone. (past perfect)
I had been going. (past perfect progressive)
I will go. (future)
I will be going. (future progressive)
I will have gone. (future perfect)
I will have been going. (future perfect progressive)
I would go. (conditional)
I would be going. (conditional progressive)
I would have been going to go
I would have gone. (conditional perfect)
I would have been going. (conditional perfect progressive)
What don’t I know here? Are these names inaccurate? Where does the “I am going to go” type of construction fit in?
(I remember trying to compare verb tenses between English, French, and Esperanto. Very interesting to see the things that don’t correspond in each language.)
I’m not convinced this is a valid construction…
You missed a couple:
I have gone (present perfect).
I have been going (present perfect continuous/progressive)
Oh yeah. <blush> I had a feeling I missed a couple, pulykamell. 
(Is avalid construction in the Pit?)
The “I would have been going to go” I forgot to eliminate during editing. I was trying to make a “going to” version of as many as I could. But then I started to realise that you can make all kinds of tortured constructions with auxiliary verbs that may or may not mean anything.
What was that segment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where they have to invent new verb tenses for time-traveling?
The dedication page to this book (written in a such a way so as to mimic the way a Louisiana Cajun speaks*) reads, IIRC, “Dis book dedicated to all you Yankees out dair. May’e ya’ll soun’ funny to us!”
*sure sounds like my grandfather, I gar-on-tee.
We don’t care how you did it down South.
I don’t know if it’s a tense, but it certainly makes sense. If, hypothetically, at some time in the past, you would have intended, some time after that, to go:
I would have been going to go to market, only I didn’t have anything to sell, so when a visitor arrived, I told her I was free all day.
It may very well be possible, but it sounds horrendously awful. How 'bout the simpler 3rd conditional: “I would have gone to the market, only I didn’t have anything to sell…” or, if you must “I would have been going to the market, only I didn’t have anything to sell…”
“I would have been going to go…” is cacophonous, confusing, and just plain yucky.
As long as we’re harping on the phrase fixin’ to I would like to add take and.
This is invariably spoken and is also a highly annoying … annoying thing.
Example:
“Are you going to take and fix that car?”
“Yes, but I have to take and go to the store first.”
This ADDS NOTHING to the sentence. Stop doing it! Grrr. :mad:
Oh, they do that here, too. Well, we’re just south of Pennsylvania, so I guess it crept down below the Mason-Dixon line. I hate it.
“The car needs washed.”
ARRGGHHHHH! What happened to the “TO BE” part of that sentence?|
“TO BE.” Learn it. Love it. Live it.